curriculum & philosophy

In our family, my ultimate goal for my children, is to develop in them a life-long passion for learning. We believe in investing our time to educate “the whole child.” This isn’t confined to a 4-6 hour block of the day where they work at the computer or in workbooks. We aim to see growth in their spiritual, emotional, and academic lives.

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We utilize unit studies and lean heavily toward a Charlotte Mason approach. We do spend time doing traditional school work, but we also spend lots of time outdoors, at the library, at museums and working on forming good habits!

This site also has a wonderful free planning resource that will help you with the scope and sequence of what to teach and when to teach it. Check that out here.

Our “core” curriculum is unit study based. It can be found here. It starts with the Bible and we use it to guide our science and social studies topics. As my son transitions to middle school, I plan to add in something more rigorous for him in those subjects. For now we spend much of our time doing hands’ on projects and artwork to supplement our studies.

We get thousands of books from the public library but I also like his DVDs, these short clips as well as these cool science experiment kits. We keep a nature notebook. For social studies we try and take lots of field trips and use primary source documents as often as possible.

For literature studies, I tend to follow these suggestions for read-alouds and narration.

I love filling our home with many, many cool games and hands on learning manipulatives. I’ve done this since even before I officially homeschooled. Like Charlotte Mason says, I want to spread a feast before my children. In addition to all of that book learning, I believe that kids glean significant wisdom through their experiences. That’s why one of my main goals is to expose them to as many attractions as possible wherever we may live.

Although not *technically* curriculum per se, the two biggest components of our home education can be found by utilizing this free resource (every member of our family has his/her own card and you’ve got access to one too) as often as possible as well as celebrating beginnings and endings.

During 2015, I completed a 12 month project on habit training. You can see that entire series here: Teach Them Diligently.